Yet another journalist has been shot dead in Iraq and the trauma seems to have become perennial.
Zeena Shakir Mahmoud, a 35-year-old Iraqi journalist was shot to death in Mosul on Sunday, according to USA Today.
24 June 2007, the day of her death, marks the Iraq Journalist Day. A coincidence? Or a deliberate warning?
She was attacked on her way back home from work. She is the second female journalist to have faced the terrible fate this month in Northern Iraq, according to officials.
Mahmoud was a former radio broadcaster. She was working on women’s affairs for the newspaper Al-Haqiqa, which is owned by the Kurdistan Democratic Party, as Abdul-Ghani Ali Yahya, head of the Journalists Union of Kurdistan, said. Even though working for a Kurdish paper, she herself was a Sunni Arab.
Previously, she was working as a broadcaster for the Voice of Mosul Radio, run by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party.
She was attacked near the Sunni Arab neighborhood of Intisar in eastern Mosul, a city 225 miles northwest of the capital at around 3:35 pm on Sunday, according to Police Brigadier General Abdul Karim al Jabouri.
The other most recent incident of the murder of an Iraqi journalist, still fresh in our minds, is the case of Sahar al-Haidari, a 45-year-old journalist with the independent Voices of Iraq news agency, who was murdered by gunmen in the central neighborhood of Hadbaa on June 7, 2007.
Other similar instances include the violent death of five employees of The Associated Press since the Iraq war began. Another recent victim was Said M. Fakhry, an AP Television News cameraman who was shot dead on May 31 in his Baghdad neighborhood.
Before the death of Mahmoud, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists had listed at least 108 journalists killed since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003. Eighty-six of them were Iraqis.
rime Minister Nouri al-Maliki acknowledged Iraq Journalist Day by acknowledging the fatal truth that high numbers of Iraqi journalists murdered in the country. He said that the blood of the Iraqi people was mixed with the blood of those ‘who die every day for the sake of defending Iraq’. The chief of the Journalist’s Union addressed the murder of Mahmoud as a ‘criminal act’.
However, just words would not suffice, when the atrocity is so vehement. Some measures more concrete need to be taken up. The acts of violence against journalists in Iraq are to be taken a little more seriously. These murders may be a result of growing conflicts between different political organizations in the country, they may be the result of anarchy caused by foreign intervention, but at the end of the day, they are affecting a singular community - the journalists.
The constant acts of violence in Iraq against journalists are more than just acts of violence. They are symbolical in their manifestation. They are a warning, a threat from the extremist communities in Iraq towards Freedom of Speech. Will the matured and independent humanity of 2007 submit to these threats, or will it fight back?
Via : USA Today
Image Credit : Baghdad Treasure, Typepad
